66 THE NEW YORKER, NOVEMBER 2, 2015
ANNALS OF GASTRONOMY
WHO'S TO JUDGE?
How the World 's 50 Best Restaurants are chosen.
BY LAUREN COLLINS
In the colonnaded courtyard of the
Antiguo Colegio de San Ildefonso,
a former Jesuit boarding school in Mex-
ico City, under a grove of magnolia trees
hung with punched-tin stars, more
than five hundred people had gathered
to learn which restaurants would be pro-
claimed the fifty best in Latin Amer-
ica.The party was meant to be attended
with a drink in one hand, a phone in
the other. There were a multitude of
bars: wine by Robert Mondavi, tequila
by Casa Dragones, rum by Zacapa,
champagne by Veuve Clicquot. The
Modelo stand was manned by a team
of studs in suspenders. Water somme-
liers---white tie, white gloves, wearing
tasting cups on silver chains---circulated
with magnums of San Pellegrino. In-
side the program, the event's organiz-
ers, the World's 50 Best Restaurants,
had enclosed a card. It listed Twitter,
Facebook, and Instagram information
and a hashtag, #LatAm50Best.The pass-
word for the 50 Best Wi-Fi network was
Mexico2015, which had the advantage
of being both dryly factual and sound-
ing like a tourist-board come-on.
The guests were drawn mainly from
three constituencies: chefs, journalists,
and businesspeople---a triad that thrived
as interdependently as corn, beans, and
squash. The chefs ran the restaurants,
which the journalists wrote about, pro-
moting the businesspeople's interests, so
that they plowed more money into the
chefs' projects, which yielded fodder for
the journalists. Onstage, the host was
announcing the winners in descending
order. (Seeking to extend the brand, in
2013 the World's 50 Best Restaurants
launched separate lists for Asia and Latin
America.) Everyone talked through the
presentation, but the furious network-
ing only heightened the excitement.
"It's very di cult to get on the list,
and it's very di cult to get o ," an event
planner said to a restaurant consultant.
"You have to work like crazy," a chef
told a reporter. "You have to do new
things all the time, you have to focus on
the food, you have to talk to the press."
The lights went down, and a video
extolling the gastronomy of Mexico
began.
"We believe that Peru has made more
e orts," a government o cial at one of
the tables remarked, of the P.R. o en-
sive. "Now, in Mexico, we have a policy
for culinary diplomacy."
Rodolfo Guzmán, a chef from Chile,
ascended the stage to collect the Chefs'
Choice Award. At Boragó, his restau-
rant in Santiago, he uses mostly indig-
enous ingredients, relying on more than
two hundred foragers and small pro-
ducers to supply the raw materials for
dishes such as venison tartare with maqui
berries and a soup of Patagonian rain-
water served on a bed of moss. Guz-
mán had the dreamy, doomed look of a
duellist (or, as more than one woman in
the audience pointed out, of Johnny
Depp). Unlike his peers, who pumped
fists and garlanded themselves in sa ron-
colored raw-silk scarves furnished by
LesConcierges, "the premier provider
of global lifestyle services and solutions,"
he seemed abashed to be standing on a
podium, under a giant projection of his
own head shot.
"Fantastic!"Je rey Merrihue, a mar-
keting expert and "semi-pro" epicure,
who had eaten in forty-one of the
World's 50 Best Restaurants, yelled to
his wife, who had been to twenty-eight.
"Where I was having lunch today, he
was eating by himself, so I sent him the
most expensive fucking glass of red wine
in the whole restaurant and went over
and had dessert with him!" He posted
a picture to his social-media feeds, which
also featured a shot of his young son "in
a hotel bathrobe after falling into a fish
pond at a 1 Michelin star restaurant in
Warwick, England."
Juan Pablo Ballesteros Canales was
teetering on a stool. Ballesteros is the
great-grandson of Dionisio Mollinedo
Hernández, who, in 1912, founded Café
de Tacuba, one of Mexico City's classic
restaurants. In 2013, Ballesteros opened
Limosneros, a high-end but straight-
forwardly Mexican restaurant in a co-
lonial building in the city's centro histórico.
He had poured everything into making
Limosneros worthy of his heritage, re-
storing the building's stone walls and
brick ceilings, seeking out Huichol em-
broideries to hang on the walls, design-
ing light fixtures that resembled guaca-
mole pestles.
He drank a single malt from a snif-
ter, grimacing. "We plan to be open for
a hundred years!" he said, and looked
around. "Is this real? No, it's not real.
It's gossip."
He scythed a hand through the air---
as if to say, "And I mean all of it"---and
continued, "Mexico's got such richness
that nobody ever expresses.What amount
of subjectivity should you put on that
tortilla?"
He took another sip. "They're busi-
nessmen. They blow-jobbed their way
through this. Pseudo critics---are they
allowed to judge?
"I know the fisherman, I know the
guy who killed the pig, I know the cow-
slayer who tastes every dish before it's
on any menu. What I'm saying is, there
are really great restaurants, but it's all
el dedazo," he continued, using a Span-
ish word that refers, in Mexico, to "the
big finger" that manipulates the politi-
cal system.
The first World's 50 Best Restau-
rants list appeared in 2002, in Res-
taurant, a British trade magazine. (Wil-
liam Reed Business Media, its parent
company, also publishes such titles as
Convenience Store and The Grocer.) " We
were a bunch of youngish, stroppy food
fans," Chris Maillard, an editor at the
time, recalled. "We played terrible indie
music loudly in the o ce, which was